>> Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab .
I'm Tom Zinnen.
I work here at the UW Madison Biotechnology Center.
I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on
behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin
Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW
Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday
Nite at the Lab .
We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year.
Tonight, it's my pleasure to introduce to you Darlene Konkle.
She's an Assistant State Veterinarian with the Wisconsin
Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection.
She was born in Freedom, Wisconsin, and went to Freedom
High School.
She came here to UW Madison for her undergraduate degree.
She also got her DVM, doctor of veterinary medicine, here at UW
Madison.
And then she went to Missoula, Montana, which is a pretty nice
place to be, and then she went to Kentucky and worked on
horses, and then she came back here for a residency fellowship
at the School of Veterinary Medicine on large animals.
And she's been with the Department of Agriculture, Trade
and Consumer Protection for about the last 10 years.
Tonight, she gets to talk with us about high pathogenicity
avian influenza, Wisconsin responds.
Please join me in welcoming Darlene Konkle to Wednesday Nite
at the Lab .
[APPLAUSE]
>> Thank you very much, everyone, for being here
tonight, giving up that nice, warm, sunny evening Tom was
talking about.
And thank you, Tom, for having me tonight.
As Tom mentioned, I'm the Assistant State Veterinarian,
and part of my duties are to help the state prepare for
animal disease emergencies.
And I've been involved with that for about the last seven to
eight years with the Department of Agriculture, Trade and
Consumer Protection, and now I get to speak with you tonight
about our first major emergency, disease emergency, that I've
been involved with with the State of Wisconsin.
So we've had a time of it this spring, and I wanted to just
relay with you some of the more interesting aspects of our
response to high path avian influenza in Wisconsin.
Just a little bit about the virus, an introduction.
This is a generic sort of graphic of an influenza virus,
and you'll notice the title slide said H5N2.
That is the variety of avian influenza that we had in
Wisconsin, and the major one that was circulating around the
United States this spring.
And the H and the N refer to proteins on the surface of the
virus, and they tend to be markers that we can use to help
identify different viruses.
So, the N stands for neuraminidase, and the H stands
for hemagglutinin.
They can mix and match in different varieties, and thus we
come up with different strains of high path avian influenza,
and actually low path as well.
Many of these diseases circulate, these viruses
circulate normally in the wild bird population.
We try very hard to keep them out of our domestic birds and
our domestic poultry, but they do circulate out there in the
wild.
And the main ones we're concerned with for poultry are
the H5s and the H7s.
Those are the ones that tend to be more apt to mutate into a
high path form.
They're also the ones that we're a little more concerned about
with potential ability to transmit to human beings.
Over the past 10 years, there's been an H5N1 virus, as many of
you know, circulating in Asia and parts of Africa.
That is infectious to people and can kill people, and we've been
preparing for that in similar virus introductions in the
United States for a long time.
So we've been very fortunate with this particular virus that
it has shown no signs of being able to infect people.
This is the current situation nationally.
You see Wisconsin sitting at the eastern edge of the main
findings for avian influenza across the country.
It began in December of 2014, where the first detection was
reported on the west coast, Pacific northwest in backyard
birds, and, actually, one finding in a captive wildlife
bird, a captive falcon.
And then we had a little lull between December and January.
In February, no new cases.
And then in the beginning of March, we had the first
detection in the Midwest, which was in Minnesota.
So, overall, to this date, there's been nearly 50 million
birds affected by this disease, and over 223 detections reported
across the country.
So, what's at stake for us here in Wisconsin?
Why do we care?
In Wisconsin, agriculture is a very big industry for us, and
I'm not just saying that because I work for the Department of
Agriculture here in Wisconsin.
Agriculture generates $88 billion for Wisconsin annually,
and over 350,000 jobs in this states are related to
agriculture.
So it's a big business for us and supports a lot of our
economy here in Wisconsin.
For poultry, Wisconsin ranks 22nd in the US.
So we're not one of the major heavy hitters for poultry here
in Wisconsin, but we've got a really diverse poultry industry
in this state.
We have several big corporations, some of which are
based here in Wisconsin, and some who have their parent
companies elsewhere in the Midwest.
But we've got laying egg facilities, both cage-free and
caged layers, as well as organic layers.
Some of these facilities are large enough they have two to
three million birds on a single premises We've also got meat
type chickens called broilers in the western part of the state,
and also turkey growers in the northwest part of the state.
We also have a really varied game bird industry in this
state, birds raised for hunting and birds raised for release as
game birds.
And some of those producers actually export a lot of those
birds overseas.
So it's a big market for them.
And then we have many, many, many very small poultry flocks,
backyard flocks.
Do any of you have poultry of your own here in Madison or
elsewhere?
I see a couple hands.
Madison has allowed poultry within city limits now for quite
a few years, and many other cities are following suit.
It's become a very popular hobby to have your own chickens or
even turkeys and other birds to produce eggs or just for
enjoyment.
For Wisconsin, over $65 million is related to being able to
export poultry and poultry products, and when we get a
disease incursion like high path avian influenza, many of those
export markets are shut off.
So that becomes an economic factor for us too.
And I realize you can't read the legend on this, but it really
doesn't matter.
Here's a screen shot of our registered poultry premises in
Wisconsin.
And, as you can see, it's kind of a blue haze.
We have almost 19,000 registered poultry premises across the
state of Wisconsin.
And, as you can see, they're scattered throughout the state.
There isn't one area for us to concentrate on.
They're pretty much everywhere.
Many of the dots on this map are small backyard poultry
producers.
And Wisconsin does have mandatory premises registration.
So it is the law that if you have any sort of livestock or
poultry, you need to register your premises with the state.
And the good news for that is it's free.
Absolutely free, and it's easy.
You can do that online, you can do it in person or over the
phone, or you can send that registration in by mail.
And, really, the main information we need is the
location of the premises, what kind of species you have,
whether it's poultry, whether it's cattle, whether it's
horses, and we don't necessarily need to know how many or the
individual numbers.
We just want to know where those locations are so we can locate
them quickly is there is a disease event and locate
neighboring premises quickly and easily to inform those folks if
there is something happening in the area.
So here's a little bit of a review of the high path avian
influenza situation in the US over the past few months.
Again, first detection was in December, just before Christmas.
And originally in North America, British Columbia had the first
identification, followed fairly shortly after in Washington and
Oregon in backyard flocks We had been preparing for avian
influenza actually for many years.
We've done annual exercises.
We've done tabletop exercise, which, for those of you who
aren't familiar, it's kind of just like it sounds.
People sit around a table with a scenario and talk through what
might happen and what might your response actions be.
And then there's a recorder who gathers all that valuable
information, and then if you are able and it's ideal to take that
template and go out in the field with it and do a functional or a
full scale exercise, see if your initial plan is going to work
when you're faced with some fairly real life conditions.
So we've been preparing for that for quite a few years, up to 10
years, and we knew high path avian influenza was in the
western states, and began ramping up our preparations, and
then we really ramped up when, in the beginning of March,
Minnesota reported their first detection in a poultry flock in
the west central part of Minnesota.
That was maybe a little surprising because Minnesota is
not that different from Wisconsin, and we're all hardy
northern Midwesterners.
Not much open water anywhere beginning in March in Minnesota
or Wisconsin, so not much waterfowl moving through that
many people see.
So still work ongoing on where that first introduction may have
come from and how the other introductions came to be.
So we did ramp up our preparations, began having
additional meetings.
We have really good relationships with out industry
partners and with other agencies.
Ramped up our preparations, got out our plans, looked at them
with more scrutiny, and looked at our staff preparations, made
sure we had enough supplies on-hand to mount a response and
that our staff had medical clearance to wear respirators,
which was going to be important on our response, and I'll talk
about that a little bit more later.
So then, post-March 4th and the later parts of March, other
Midwestern states starting having more detections as well.
So we were not surprised when we got an initial notification at
the beginning of April.
April 10th was our first case here in Wisconsin.
It was confirmed on Monday, April 13th, as an H5N2.
It does take a couple of days to actually confirm the type of
virus.
The initial notification can come much earlier, which is good
news for us.
We can prepare and respond then more quickly.
It happened to be a cage-free layer facility in Jefferson
County with 200,000 birds on that premises.
And their story was they saw a slight increase in their
mortality rate starting on the Monday, April 6th.
Most of these places, commercial turkey and chicken flocks,
they're keeping daily and sometimes multiple time a day
records on feed consumption, water consumption, egg
production, mortality rates.
They're keeping pretty accurate records there.
So when they see any slight uptick, they are paying
attention, especially when they know high path avian influenza
is in the vicinity.
Over the next two or three days, they saw more slight increases,
and they sent samples into a Missouri veterinary diagnostic
laboratory.
So that Missouri lab received, tested those samples, got what
they called an AI matrix positive.
That just means they know they have an avian influenza virus, a
type A avian influenza virus.
They don't know whether it's H5 or H7 or what type it is yet.
But at that point, they notified our state veterinarian, happened
to be in the evening, always is, and he happened to be out of
town.
That's the other thing that always happens when you get a
response is your boss is out of town.
[COUGHING] Excuse me.
So we received that on April 9th and began ramping up.
Our incident management team had already been meeting and
discussing our plans.
So on that Friday morning even before we knew what type we had,
we got together and began planning.
This was maybe a little bit different than we had practice
and that we had planned for.
As I said, we do exercise and plan each year and look at those
plans.
First of all, most of the flocks that have been affected up to
that point were commercial turkey premises in Minnesota and
these other states, and they were seeing massive mortalities
almost immediately.
They were seeing hourly increases in mortality rates.
Over an entire barn, over the course of a day, entire barns
would die from this virus.
This is how pathogenic this particular strain was to
turkeys.
We didn't see that in this case.
We saw definitely increased mortality, but not this extreme
mortality that we thought we might see.
We happened to be the first state that had high path avian
influenza in a commercial layer chicken facility.
So, as it turns out, the chickens react just slightly
different than the turkeys did.
So this is what the exterior, it's actually a Google Earth
shot, of one of these premises might look.
We've got poultry barns.
See if my mouse works here.
Oops, I'm going to go backwards here.
The long structures are the poultry houses.
The one on the left is actually a double decker.
There's a poultry house on top of another poultry house, which
is why it looks a little different.
Each of those are about 700-some feet long.
So they're really big.
The building on the top, you can barely see there's a semi truck
trailer backed up to it, is the egg collection facility.
So these were shell eggs being produced at this facility.
So, large facilities.
This happens to be 200,000 birds.
There are many such flocks, some in Wisconsin and many in Iowa
and Minnesota, that are potentially more than 10 times
that big.
So they're large, complex facilities.
This is what the inside looks like.
You can see that, again, the building is quite long.
You're looking from one end to another, about 700 feet.
And what you're see from right to left is the nest boxes and
perching areas for these birds.
And then there's a system of conveyor belts and so forth
underneath to convey the eggs, and then also the waste off to
their respective buildings What you probably can't appreciate is
there's a lot of infrastructure in that building.
There's a lot of metal parts.
It's all welded in place.
There's nothing that can really be removed easily, and that
alleyway is about three feet wide.
So there's not a great way to get any equipment in there.
It's designed to be closed in, and it's not designed to get
heavy equipment through there.
So that'll be important to us later on when we're trying to
figure out how to manage this facility.
So our response actions, we work under what's called the incident
command system.
All state and federal, and local agencies too, work under that
for emergencies.
It allows you to organize quickly.
It allows for an efficient span of control and for communication
among the different functions that are needed for an emergency
response.
So it's a little big different than our day to day way we
operate.
So we practice it too.
And we have a great incident management team for animal
health that jumped right in and began working.
And our major goal is, of course, to control the spread of
this disease.
We don't, first of all, we love to prevent it's introduction
entirely.
That didn't happen in this case.
We did get our first case.
But from here, we want to control its spread.
High path avian influenza is very contagious from bird to
bird, and the birds become little virus factories.
The virus is taking advantage of the infrastructure in those
birds, and it's replicating and it's producing millions of virus
particles.
So in a premises with 200,000 birds, we want to try to control
the spread of that virus as much as we possibly can.
Our first goal is always to maintain the health and safety
of our own responders and of the public.
As I mentioned, this particular virus, so far at least, doesn't
show any signs of being able to infect people, which is very
good news.
So, to control the spread, what we immediately do is quarantine
that infected premises and make sure that no animals or animal
products are moving on or off.
We notify those surrounding premises within 10 kilometers.
Anybody that has poultry, we notify them, and we did send out
notifications through other channels to poultry producers
and our commercial flocks when we knew we had that first
positive.
So our premises registration system really helps us out in
this case.
We can get data pretty much immediately from our geographic
information services staff.
They can produce maps from that premises data.
We've got great contact information there that's
complete, and we can get out to those other premises and test
birds if we need to really quickly.
One of the other first steps is an indemnification process.
Through USDA, these infected premises are eligible to get
indemnity for the birds that do need to be destroyed to control
the spread of this disease.
There's an assessment process there.
The poultry industry, in particular, seems to have a good
one.
There are differences in classes and ages of birds, and there's
also indemnification for eggs and egg products that would need
to be destroyed.
So it's a fairly quick calculation and inventory
process that can get that process moving pretty quickly.
And, unfortunately, the control method we have those most
effective at controlling the virus is to depopulate the
infected birds.
So to find the best way to humanely and safely and quickly
get in there and depopulate an infected flock.
They'll also need to dispose of those infected carcasses Can't
just take them down the road because even though they're
dead, there's still some virus remaining.
The virus can only survive and replicate in a live animal, but
there's still residual that could be tracked around on
equipment or on truck tires, things like that.
So our major method of disposal for this premises was
composting, and that worked out pretty well for us.
Then there's a process of cleaning and disinfection of an
infected premises to wash everything down, get rid of all
the organic matter, clean and disinfect so it's as spick and
span and spotless as we can make it, and then a period of waiting
and some cases drying and heating to, again, all these
different steps to make sure we kill the virus in question.
And the reason we go through so many steps is there's no one
perfect way to kill all the virus, especially when you have
a large premises and lots of virus being produced.
Our next task, and this is all kind of simultaneous, is we need
to do area surveillance over a 10 kilometer area around an
infected premises.
We need to demonstrate that there's no other virus in the
area.
That's one to kind of do our due diligence.
If the virus managed to make its way into especially a commercial
premises, which are pretty biosecure, are we seeing it in
some of these other backyard flocks too?
So we go out there and actually test and see whether it's there
or not.
And that's also important for our trading partners as well.
They want to know if there's evidence of virus in the area.
And for the first time during this outbreak across the nation,
we implemented one of what's called the secure food supply
plans.
The secure egg supply.
This plan was developed over a period of years and had never
been implemented yet.
It's a plan that will insure safe and biosecure movement of
eggs and egg products on to production and on to the
consumer without too many interruptions in flow so that
some commerce can be maintained and product can stay on the
grocery shelves.
So here again is an interior shot of a cage-free layer
facility.
And, as I mentioned before, there's not much room to move
around in there, and that became an important consideration for
us.
How to depopulate 200,000 birds on a premises that's infected
with high path AI when you can't get any heavy equipment in
there.
The method that can be used for turkey flocks or other flocks
where the birds are primarily at ground level and they don't fly
readily is to use a foam.
Foam product similar to what firefighters use.
Quickly and humanely euthanizes those birds so that they are
disposed of in a manner that will control the spread of the
virus.
In this barn we can't do that.
We have to actually physically remove birds, and we used carbon
dioxide, CO2, as the method of depopulation.
But it was a time intensive, labor intensive process.
And we'd like to find a way to humanely depopulate large houses
more quickly than that.
One, we feel that it would be more humane to euthanize birds
quickly rather than have them die of virus, and, two, it
prevents spread of the virus the more quickly we can do that.
So this shows you an example of that surveillance area.
The inner circle is three kilometers and the outer is 10.
It happens to be around an infected premises in Jefferson
County.
And in this particular instance, we had 88 other premises within
that 10K area.
There's not much that's magic about the 10 kilometers other
than it's an accepted benchmark for how that virus might be able
to travel outside of an area.
>> Is that radius or diameter?
>> Radius.
It is radius around an infected premises.
As I said, our mapping folks can get this type of information for
us quickly.
Actually, within minutes they could have a map like this
generated for us with those dots on the map identified so that
our operation section chief could develop a list for his
folks to go out and begin testing.
And, again, we did have a couple of commercial premises within
this area, and since they were within a control area, still
were operational, they weren't infected, they wanted to still
move products.
So we developed, used those protocols in secure egg supply
to allow them to move on to processing.
Here, again, is an exterior shot.
Just shows how big these buildings are.
And those show a conveyor belt.
That's actually for a manure holding facility.
And then those large fans at the outside of the buildings.
So that becomes a concern as well.
At this point, the standard is to humanely depopulate those
birds without shutting off the ventilation in the interior of
the building.
So those buildings are still being ventilated, viruses
potentially escaping through that ventilation system So we're
trying to shut this down as much as we possibly can.
And this is our disposal method.
Those are compost piles within one of those exterior buildings
on the premises.
These look, as far as I'm told, about as pretty as compost piles
can.
Nice dark carbon material there.
If you look really closely, and if you could see a closeup,
there are some feathers and some other materials there.
As it turns out, it's relatively easy to compost poultry.
They're the right size.
They're the right composition.
They compost relatively rapidly if you have the right conditions
and you have enough carbon material.
And that is a good way to dispose of them.
You can keep a fairly compact pile.
You don't have much leachate if it's done correctly.
So no runoff that could potentially have virus.
And those piles need to come to the right temperature to kill
virus over the right period of time, and then they can be
turned for another cycle and eventually removed from that
building, and then they're free to land spread it or send it off
or whatever else they want to do with that material.
And you can see here too, it's an interesting note, the person
in the white Tyvek coveralls is one of our staff.
So he's in personal protective equipment for a couple of
reasons I'll go over later.
So, we've got our hands full, as you can imagine, with this
premises from all I've described.
We've got many different tasks we need to accomplish, some
simultaneously, but we still knew Minnesota, at this point,
was getting daily introductions of new cases.
And I think Iowa at this same time was starting to break with
new cases.
So knew there was still virus in the area.
We didn't let our guard down.
And sure enough, a few days later on April 15th, we received
word that we had actually two more premises.
We had two more right on top of each other.
One was a commercial turkey operation up in Barron County
with 126,000, and the third was a backyard flock in Juneau
County that had 33 birds, mixed species.
They had some chickens and they had some domestic waterfowl.
Interesting note on this backyard flock, they had what
some of our staff called feral domestic waterfowl.
They had birds that they purchased or received last fall,
and then over the winter those waterfowl, they just kind of
disappeared.
Juneau County has got a lot of wetlands, a lot of marshlands.
Those birds just took off for somewhere else they wanted to
be, and then came back in the spring to nest.
So, obviously, we don't know where they were in the meantime.
Very possibly they could have pick up high path avian
influenza.
And in both these cases, we were notified promptly of the
veterinarians involved.
The turkey operation has, their parent company happens to be in
Minnesota, but they have a Wisconsin corporate veterinarian
who we've got a great relationship with, and she
notified us immediately when they had the first inclination
that they might have a problem.
And then the other veterinarian was a practicing veterinarian in
central Wisconsin, a mixed animal practitioner, who was
concerned when she saw clinical signs or was notified of
clinical signs in these birds.
So she notified our office right away as well.
So that's how we like it to happen.
This is a shot of the turkey, one of the turkey flocks
actually.
This is a relatively typical, I think, turkey barn.
On the sides, those are curtains.
They get natural air coming through these turkey barns for
ventilation, and they raise and lower the curtains to control
the temperature for these birds so these birds stay comfortable.
This is a relatively good looking flock.
I apologize for the graininess and the little bit of fuzziness
in the picture, but there's a reason for that.
I'm pretty sure this shot was taken with a cell phone through
a Ziploc bag.
The veterinarian that was on-site wanted to maintain
biosecurity and not have to destroy his phone via
decontamination.
So he took the shot with the phone in a Ziploc bag so he
could decontaminate it on the way out.
So all these shots are a little bit grainy on this area.
So, again, those are pretty good looking birds.
These birds potentially have the beginnings of illness.
You can see these birds in the center and the one on the right,
they are slightly floofed up.
Feathers look a little bit floofed, if you can see that.
The coloring on the waddles and on the head and neck may or may
not be significant here.
I can't really tell.
One of the hallmarks of avian influenza and some other viral
diseases of chickens and turkeys is the birds get cyanotic
because it is a respiratory disease.
So they'll get that blue coloring.
I think that here is probably more of a just camera.
Camera artifact.
But definitely they're squatting a little bit, feathers are
fluffed up.
That's a sign they're not so comfortable.
And here is somewhat later.
You can see some of these birds have succumbed Other ones aren't
looking so hot.
They're definitely looking sick.
Minnesota showed some interesting shots at a small
meeting I was able to attend a couple of weeks ago.
Over a period of hours, that virus can go through a barn of
that size and kill all the birds.
Highly pathogenic is a good name for it.
Again, more compost.
You can compost the turkeys as well, and composting is a
science.
I'm not a compost scientist, and I'm glad there are people who
are because we utilize those people.
We actually were able to request and received a composting expert
from Cornell University to come and help us out with designing
the compost piles and training out staff to monitor those piles
effectively and get the timeline down for what we could do with
those.
So we all, in the animal health field, know a little bit more
now, more than we thought we would, about terms like
leachate, compost, things like that.
So here's the Barron County detection as well.
You can see there's a couple highways that run pretty close
by to that infected premises, and towns nearby as well.
Important part about this slide, and you won't be able to see
this identified here, but this was our major foray into the
permitting world.
This Barron County premises had surrounding commercial flocks
that were also contract growers for the turkey corporation.
They also had their hatchery, which was really important for
them.
That's their genetic stock, their eggs, that get sent out to
all their flocks, and that's within this 10K control zone,
and also they had their processing plant in here.
So the eggs, or, rather, the turkeys that were being
processed for consumption was in this control area as well.
The processing plants inspected and regulated by USDA's Food
Safety Inspection Service, so all that went on.
Definitely human health standards were maintained there.
But because it's in a control area, we don't want virus being
spread around on truck tires as these products are being moved
from place to place.
So, in each case, we developed a permitting system where the farm
would request permits, and this is all part of the secure food
supply plans as well, and agree to maintain biosecurity
standards for cleaning and disinfecting these trucks,
exterior and interior, testing any live birds and the source
birds for any eggs before movement.
As recently as 24 hours before they moved they needed to obtain
a negative test so we knew they were negative birds being moved
from place to place.
So that all helped reduce the spread, but it became its own
arm of our organizational chart.
In Minnesota, they employed upwards of 25-30 people just to
do the permitting of all these products and birds that were
moving.
In our case, it would have honestly overwhelmed our
incident management team.
We didn't have enough people to perform that task.
So USDA at the time had just set up a permitting group that we
could refer to.
So we could have them do the permitting for us once we
established the conditions, and that really helped us a lot.
Here's the control area for Juneau.
You can see it's a little more sparse There's military
installation pretty close by here, Volk Field, and there's
also a lot of wetlands.
Interestingly, the International Crane Foundation is not far from
here.
It wasn't part of the control area relatively nearby, and we'd
had meetings prior to our first introduction of avian influenza
with different zoological facilities that have birds as
well.
So they were aware of what's going on and really clamped down
on their own biosecurity as well.
So all in all this was our timeline.
We ended up with 10 infected flocks.
Six positive turkey flocks in the northwest Wisconsin area,
that one backyard flock in the middle and three infected egg
layer facilities in Jefferson County.
And overall we had nearly two million birds affected on those
10 premises.
And here's what it looks like on a map.
There were some people who considered, the highway is right
there, passing through the middle of Wisconsin diagonally.
We did not find any relationships between these
flocks, and there is a large epidemiological study going on
through USDA to look at relationships between the
infected flocks.
We do have some evidence nationally that each one of
these was not an individual introduction from contact with
wild birds.
There probably was some spread between flocks because there's a
lot of interrelationship between flocks as far as moving feed,
moving bedding material, getting products back and forth between
these flocks.
So we all need to learn how to control that better and control
spread of virus.
I wanted to talk a bit about some aspects of our response
that are above and beyond just the control of the disease but
that are also really important.
Our incident management team, we were fortunate to have a really
great safety officer, and she's the health and safety officer
for our whole department as well.
And, again, this strain was not a public health threat, but we
still worked really closely with state public health and with
local public health to determine what do our responders need to
wear for personal protective equipment in case the virus
would mutate, in case there's other strains out there that
might be a public health threat.
And we also want to outfit them so that they've got enough
protective equipment they're not going to spread virus outside of
an infected premises.
So we coordinated quite a bit through out incident management
team.
Each of our responders had to have medical clearance to wear a
respirator.
It happened to be an N95, which is the kind that fits over you
nose and mouth tightly, and they had to be fit tested to wear
that.
And then there was also a monitoring period for anybody
who was on an infected premises, including farm workers who were
helping with the response.
So they were monitored by public health.
They had to report in every day with how they were feeling, and
they also had to take temperatures for a period of
time afterward.
There were people who got sick on this response There were
people who got sick in Minnesota and Iowa.
It was March, April, and May, which is prime season still for
seasonal flu and other maladies So there definitely were people
who reported in and were sick.
None of those individuals tested positive for this strain of
influenza.
So, we also had extensive training for the use of the
personal protective equipment.
It's not all that easy to put all that one, to don up in the
Tyvek coverall, boots, gloves, some sort of hairnet or
bouffant, and then that respirator, and then, more
importantly, to take it all off efficiently when you're done and
ready to exit a premises so that you're not contaminated anything
when you do.
So our safety officers trained folks on that as well.
Then we had other health and safety issues pop up through the
period.
Weather related hazards, storms.
Our people were out on the road and in areas where there
sometimes wasn't an underground shelter in case there would be a
tornado warning.
So they had plans in place for that of where to go if there
were tornado or severe weather warnings.
And then also, kind of an analysis of the disinfectants
that were used, the facilities, protection against trips and
falls, etc.
So, health and safety is a big component of any response.
And here's a shot, a little better shot.
This is from one of our exercises back a few years ago.
A team of responders helping each other don and off.
You can see they're standing in garbage bags.
That helps when you're disinfecting each other to
capture the water, the liquid disinfectant that's running off.
So you can bag all that up into a garbage bag and get it out of
there so that you're not contaminating your area
surrounding.
So it's a process, and people need to train on it so they're
efficient at it.
Another critical aspect for us is biosecurity, and that'll be a
really ongoing factor for us going forward.
It was a standalone objective for our incident.
We made a separate objective in our incident objectives beyond
depopulation and controlling the disease.
We wanted critical biosecurity measures to be in place,
especially on an infected premises so we didn't drag virus
outside of there.
So that, we found, was critically important to stop the
spread, especially on that first introduction, on that Jefferson
County premises.
We actually enlisted help from Wisconsin's National Guard to
help clean and disinfectant vehicles because there was heavy
equipment going on and off that premises, to help clean and
disinfectant those vehicles and keep biosecurity in place.
There's a lot involved with biosecurity as well.
We have a person in our office, one of our veterinary program
managers, Dr. Patton, who's our biosecurity chief.
She's our biosecurity expert, and she was able to help look at
our protocols and ensure that biosecurity was in place.
And, again, this involved more training for farm personnel who
may not have been as familiar with it as well as our
responders.
And biosecurity concerns go all the way from begin on the
premises but also to handling your samples in the surrounding
areas.
Every sample that was taken, and these were basically throat
swabs of birds, that's how to sample for avian influenza, but
those samples go in a tube of media, they get placed in a
Ziploc bag, they get sprayed off with disinfectant, they get
placed in another Ziploc bag, and they go on to the lab.
So, lots of different barriers to prevent contamination.
And, also, for premises, we had biosecurity information on our
website and passed that out to producers and backyard flocks in
the area, encouraging people to try to mitigate their access to
either rodents, wild birds in the area, things they could do
on their own farms to enhance their biosecurity.
Another thing that the commercial flocks can do is do
periodic audits of their biosecurity.
Have either farm personnel or a third party come in, and there
are companies that actually do this service for the commercial
flocks, go in an audit their biosecurity and rate it so that
they can do better.
And here's just a shot, an example of cleaning and
disinfecting one of the dump trucks that was delivering
carbon to one of the facilities.
You can see the responders are decked out in personal
protective equipment and brought in, the National Guard was able
to buy in more high powered power washers for us that did a
more complete job of biosecurity.
And then there's the runoff from that effluent as well that we
worked with DNR with that to control the runoff and dispose
of any wastewater containing disinfectant.
So there were a lot of moving parts to the cleaning and
disinfecting as well.
Public information was another big aspect of our response.
We had fantastic public information officers at DATCP
that we're really privileged to work with, and they did just a
fantastic job of maintaining public awareness, of working
with local departments of emergency management and local
public health to get information out to try to alleviate any
misinformation or rumors and to try to alleviate any concerns
for public health and just get good information out there.
So we released a press release once we first had confirmation
of the positive, and we coordinated that with USDA.
Any press release or information we had was put on our website
for Department of Ag, Trade and Consumer Protection, along with
some fact sheets that were developed, frequently asked
questions, methods for biosecurity, links to USDA's
website and so forth.
Our public information officer also put together daily
briefings during the height of this.
So, she sent those out to over 5,000 recipients, from poultry
industry people to fellow state agencies to public recipients.
Anybody who wanted it got one, and they were posted on the
website as well.
So it was a daily briefing on what was going on, and that
really helped to keep people informed and also helped,
honestly, keep the phone calls down to our office so we weren't
generating a lot of phone calls there as well.
People felt like they were getting good information.
Also, presentations like this one and several radio and TV
interviews during this session as well.
We also, in Wisconsin, had what I think was our first governor's
declaration of a state of emergency related to an animal
disease incident So we had a template for that mocked up in
case of other emergencies, and we were able to work with
Wisconsin Emergency Management and with the Governor's Office
to get the governor to sign a declaration of emergency for our
event.
And what that did was help free up some state resources that we
could use to help us.
The declaration was statewide, but it focused in on the
affected counties, which were Barron, Chippewa, a little
corner of Chippewa, Juneau, and Jefferson.
The way that declaration was written may have helped us out,
I'm not sure, to get our trade back more quickly than not
because we wrote it statewide, that gave us some leeway if we
had additional cases, but it also focused on the counties
where we were actually working.
And when trade partners see that, they see some limitation
to what's going on.
They don't see an emergency that's out of control.
So, other states had declarations of emergency that
they actually rescinded because it impacted their ability for
those trading partners.
And, again, the main focus was it authorized deployment of
Wisconsin's National Guard troops.
We were able to get a specific unit that was proficient in
cleaning and disinfection and had all the equipment and
training to do that.
They were a major help to us, particularly at that first
Jefferson site where there was a lot of heavy equipment moving
out to that area where it was difficult to get inside the
barns.
So we really wanted to lock that premises down.
The contract grower in that case did not have a lot of resources
to bring to bear for that, did not have a lot of employees or
equipment.
So National Guard came in and really helped to keep that site
secure and keep the cleaning and disinfection that we needed in
place.
They also were able to do some tracking of personnel for us.
And they were just great partners to work with.
Another aspect to this that was a little unique, our state
veterinarian issued an order, a summary special order, that
would ban any swap meats associated with poultry or
poultry at swap meets.
And he also banned any open shows for poultry unless they
were part of a county, district, or the state fair.
So fairs that were not a county or district fair could
potentially show poultry if they applied to our office for an
exemption to this, and, in any case, any exhibitor with poultry
to one of these open shows has to sign a statement before
bringing birds certifying that they've had no death loss within
the past 10 days in their flocks.
So that allowed a couple of things.
It allowed some of the so-called show to go on, that we could
still have our county and state fair poultry exhibits this
summer, but it gave us some measure of assurance that some
of the unregulated fairs maybe were not going on and that our
county fairs and state fair going on during the summer is a
less risky time for us.
In the summer, it's hot enough, the virus, we haven't had any
new introduction since May, May 5th.
So we've got a bit of a lull here that we hope we can enjoy
for the next month or two before we may get the virus back in
fall.
So we had that discrete area where we were comfortable enough
to allow fairs and poultry exhibits to go on with that
assurance of no death loss.
And our liaisons and partnerships with other agencies
were really important during this time as well.
We worked with our own staff, of course.
And I should mention that our Division of Animal Health, our
state veterinarian is our leader there.
We have 45 employees in our division.
About half of us are in the office; the other half our out
in the field in different areas of Wisconsin.
And 45 is not enough people to manage a large scale disease
response, and we knew that going in.
So we partnered with other agencies, received help from
USDA Veterinary Services, USDA APHIS.
They sent in one of their incident management teams on our
request, the end of April, for a three-week rotation through
right about when we were getting pretty tired.
We'd been at it nonstop for three or four weeks and were up
to seven premises.
USDA was able to send us the team with backups that we could
integrate with, and they were very professional.
We also partnered with the poultry industry.
We'd done exercises and meetings and outreach with them for
several years.
And many of these companies brought a lot of their own
resources to the table in dealing with these outbreaks.
They had their own employees employed in depopulating birds
and in cleaning and disinfecting, and also their own
resources.
We also worked really closely with the counties involved, with
their emergency managers, keeping them informed.
And a lot of times they had good input for us on what other
resources might be available in that county that we could tap
into.
And we worked really closely with state and local public
health agents and with Wisconsin DNR.
We have not yet had a chance to sit down with DNR on this.
We're going to be doing that next week, to go over kind of a
debrief of this incident.
I mentioned compost.
DNR has some experts that helped us out there with monitoring the
compost.
They also had their water division experts that helped us
with ways to dispose of any water effluent from the cleaning
and disinfection, and also some of the products that needed to
be disposed of.
There was egg and egg products that needed to go to disposal,
and DNR was able to help us find outlets for those and go through
permitting process that they already regulate.
I mentioned Wisconsin National Guard and also Wisconsin
Emergency Management opened up the State Emergency Operation
Center at level four, and that meant they opened what's called
their E-sponders site, which is a SharePoint site that all the
agencies can have access to to monitor our situation.
We were just able to have a sit down debrief with most of these
agencies and several others as well.
Just yesterday, as a matter of fact.
Sat around the table in DATCP's board room and talked through
the incident, identified ways we might be able to do better next
time and what went well this time.
And one of the things we very well may do if a similar
incident or a larger one comes up in the future is have
Wisconsin Emergency Management open up that Emergency Operation
Center at a higher level, bring people actually in there to
coordinate so we can get resources more quickly.
This, again, is kind of a summary map of the national
situation That dark purple in the center is kind of the
epicenter of the Midwestern high path AI outbreak.
You can see Wisconsin is kind of on the fringe.
We were kind of on the eastern fringe there.
I don't have a time lapse of it, but there's not a real clean
east to west or west to east or north to south progression of
this.
It was individual, a lot of individual introductions over
this period of time.
USDA is looking at mountains of data that's been supplied by
each of these farms to look at any linkages, try to make
predictions for the future, and look at how this disease
possibly could have spread farm to farm and how many might have
been individual introductions.
So they're doing a lot of work there, some of which is already
posted on their website.
Some of those investigations, some of the preliminary
information is already up there.
So, impacts.
What did it mean for us so far?
We're still compiling a lot of this information, but trade bans
were one of the major ones for us.
Immediately, and actually even before we officially announced
our first case, Canada imposed restrictions on poultry products
from Wisconsin.
They caught wind of it, they knew it was happening on other
states, and other countries followed suit as a matter of
course.
So, really, the minute a state or country declares a foreign
animal disease like high path avian influenza, our
international exports stop.
Usually USDA's international staff is able to do a terrific
job in negotiating these trade agreements and are able to
mitigate that as much as possible.
But the poultry industry exports about 18% of its profits.
So when that 18% goes away, it impacts them quite a bit.
Also, there was a direct cost to industry.
I mentioned they got indemnified for poultry and poultry
products.
They also were reimbursed for some of the work they did, some
of the time and the personnel that contributed to their
response.
But there's still lost revenue, lost genetic material from these
hatching eggs and from the genetic stock that they have,
and also, at least in Minnesota, there were layoffs associated
with this, with plants closing.
The response costs for us we haven't tallied yet.
We do have a significant cost to us in terms of outright supplies
and also personnel time and materials.
For USDA, the last number I've seen approaches $700 million.
There were just $300 million appropriated from the Commodity
Credit Corporation funds to again assist with this response.
There was also a cost to you and me, as consumers.
We saw price increases at the grocery store, saw some supply
impacts on certain products, and also we found out some of our
limitations in resources for depopulating and disposing of
these large flocks.
And, again, this was the first implementation of these secure
food supply protocols, which we hope to be able to use with
little or no risk to spreading disease, for not only future
high path AI outbreaks, but also for something like foot and
mouth disease or another disease impact in the future.
So, what's next?
What are we planning for next?
Tom keeps asking me if it's coming back in the fall, and I
keep saying I do not know.
I wish I had the crystal ball.
But we have to plan for it.
We have to assume it's coming back when these birds start
migrating back in September, October, and November.
So we are planning for that.
We're trying to plan for the worst case scenario.
USDA just had an invitational meeting a couple weeks ago with
state veterinarians in which they laid out some scenarios
that would impact multiple areas across the country and really
stretch resources, and then where do we gain additional
resources.
So we're working through the numbers there.
Analyzing the epidemiology information we already have,
trying to identify where our gaps are and where we can plug
those or gain additional resources.
One of our big lessons learned in Wisconsin is that even though
we responded quickly and efficiently, we know that we're
going to run out of steam after about three or four weeks, and
we need to plan for that right at the beginning.
We need to make plans to get other teams in, other responders
in, even when we start responding so that we can have
an efficient roll-over of personnel and keep everybody up
to speed.
And we're developing our standard operating procedures
for biosecurity in response as well.
So we've begun the process.
We still have these premises still under quarantine.
We're just about at the point that they've gone through enough
time, gone through all their cleaning and disinfection, been
empty of birds for a long enough time that according to the
guidance and the protocols we have in place, we're sampling
them, the environment, and those samples are coming back
negative.
Some of these premises are getting ready to restock in the
next couple of weeks.
So that will be a big milestone for us.
So we're still identifying our lessons learned and moving
towards the future here for other introductions of high path
AI or other diseases, like foot and mouth, that might affect our
other industries.
So, with that, I'd like to thank you all very much for being here
tonight and for your attention, and have a great rest of your
week.
Thank you again.
[APPLAUSE]